During WWII, pacific islands were used as staging grounds for aircraft and cargo. Natives attempted to duplicate the airplanes, landing strips, and even headphones, using wood and straw as basic materials. Known as cargo cults, their duplicates were very close in form to the things they were copying, though obviously lacked the function and substance as they did not understand the basics for how these things worked. The term cargo cult has since been used to describe any imitation that mimics the superficials of the real thing but lacks the substance. Which brings me to Dell’s Project Hybrid and their blades strategy.
In May, Dell showed a sneak-peak of their forthcoming blades. Superficially, they look remarkably similar to the HP BladeSystem c-class and they even use similar words and phrases to describe their future product. Of course the success of BladeSystem has not been based on the shape of the enclosure, but the substance of the value it brings to customers.
Dell has been publicly trying to mis-characterize our “blade everything” strategy as “blade only” despite the obvious fact that HP continues to sell many non-blade servers, storage, and networking products. Of course our actual goal of blading everything is to enable IT infrastructure to be bladed. In their public statements trying to distance themselves from a “blade everything” strategy, Dell states they believe power and cooling along with simplicity are reasons to avoid blades altogether. Which makes me wonder if they really understand the substance of what BladeSystem c-class delivers, since these are some of the very reasons customers select BladeSystem c-class, not avoid it!
For instance, 16 HP Blades takes comparable or less power, and just as crucial, considerably less cooling than 10 similarly configured 1U servers, meaning that generally speaking c-class blades are actually friendlier for data centers than rack-mount servers. In fact, one customer decided to switch to c-class in lieu of building a new data center. Yet Dell insists that blades may force customers to upgrade their data centers or even buy new ones.
Dell has also made an unusual argument that blades increase customer complexity. Once again, reducing complexity is precisely one of the reasons customers adopt BladeSystem. With installation in seconds (including complete rack-level integration as a factory option), provisioning in hours or even minutes without the need to pull in network, storage, and facilities expertise, and management locally and remotely, and a common user experience for managing all elements (which is consistent with ProLiant rack mount servers too), customers frequently find c-class just plain simpler.
Dell may be able to mimic the shape of a box, but their statements make me wonder if they actually understand what makes blades better. |
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